The military is examining the viability of building fleets of drones and linking them together into drone fleets.

Armies of robotic drones may be just around the corner. Taking a cue from The Terminator films, the U.S. Navy is developing unmanned fighting vehicles that network together and operate in “swarms.” The U.S. military’s unmanned drone planes have proven one of the most effective — and most controversial — weapons in the arsenal in recent years. American officials credit the use of Predator aircraft, which are armed with guided missiles, with eliminating a growing number of senior terrorist leaders who were beyond the reach of ground forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Before I address that though, I have to point out that this photo of a drone is actually much more interesting to me because of the dramatic wall cloud dropping out of the sky behind it. That’s about to be ground zero for a tornado folks!

Back to swarms of drones… I have before predicted that the next big war would be fought with swarms of unmanned drones and electronic “cyber” attacks against the enemy command and control systems. For the cost of a single B2 bomber, or F-22 fighter, we could easily put a hundred drone aircraft into combat, each one capable of dropping a hellfire missile, or providing battle intel, or any of a range of other military uses. Like a swarm of gnats they would be virtually impossible to stop. You don’t need stealth with this approach because the strength of the strategy is the swarm itself. Stealth is still useful in some situations, but for sheer military effectiveness a swarm of small drones carrying missiles and guns would be unbelievably effective.

I once created a tabletop war game called “Ragnarok”. In that game I had many different types of ships that moved around, using battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, etc. as a model. It was a really fun game to play too. After a while though, I wanted to abstract it further, so I created a new game that had different pieces that moved and threatened in different ways. I immediately assumed that the most deadly pieces in the game would be the ones which moved the farthest, fastest, did the most damage and had the longest range.

But just to round things out, I created these tiny little ships that moved only ten squares and did only a moderate amount of damage within only a few squares (actually hexagons, but that doesn’t matter). They were the weakest pieces on the board. So I gave each player about a dozen of them. The key thing about them is that they moved TOGETHER, meaning the player moved all twelve of them on his turn, if he moved them instead of another piece.

They turned out to be the game-changer. Working together as a swarm they could box in and wear down the biggest enemies simply by sheer numbers. Sure a lot of them got blasted out of existence, but you couldn’t kill them fast enough to keep them from killing you. The best strategy ended up being to put your biggest, baddest ships in the middle of the swarm and moving them as a unit, then attacking anything you could trap with both the big guns and the swarm.

I suspect a similar approach would be devastatingly effective in actual combat. Go ahead, shoot down a dozen of my drones! I’ve only got 500 more…